Sentiment analysis is an emerging area of social analytics technology that is being used pervasively by analytical solutions. To that end, various systems have been described for capturing and visualizing the mood of an individual. That is, the systems attempt to display a visualization of the current emotional mood or state of mind of an individual or perhaps group of people.
For example, one example type of system attempts to analyze Internet blogs in social networking sites in order to extract sentences and other information that provide an indication of an individuals emotions along with demographic and location information for that user. These systems attempt to apply natural language processing to classify the information into specific sentiments and create a visualization that presents a colorful interface showing a user's emotion by way of dots, where each dot represents a sentence with its color representing that sentiment. For example, a sentence indicative of a happy feeling may be presented in bright yellow or a sentence indicative of an angry feeling may be represented in red. These types of systems often tend to be inaccurate in that mood information must be indirectly inferred from textual analysis of sentences. Due to the ambiguous nature of language, the systems tend to incorrectly classify sentences and, as a result, misrepresent the mood of the individual. Moreover, the systems do not provide any ability to view the mood of an individual relative an overall mood of a group of individuals.
In other examples, some systems allow users to record their moods from a set of possible moods. The system presents the visualization data for a single user as a page filled with colored horizontal strips, where the length of a strip corresponds to the duration of an individual's mood over time. Visualizations of the moods for users can be shared with others and recent moods are posted on a main software page. These systems also do not provide any ability to view the mood of an individual relative an overall mood of a group of individuals nor depict the dynamics within an overall mood of a group of users.